


Resuscitation

by LadyWillow



Series: Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor [6]
Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-03
Updated: 2016-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-24 11:50:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6152776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyWillow/pseuds/LadyWillow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <b>resuscitation<b>: </b></b>
  <i>The action or process of reviving someone from unconsciousness or apparent death. </i>
  <br/>
  <i>(Oxford Dictionary Online)</i>
  <br/>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Resuscitation

Daniel Sousa had died before.

He had crashed not once but twice on that nightmarish field in Belgium. The first time, he was brought back when a fellow soldier thumped his chest and screamed, foul-breathed, in his face. The second time was when his lifeless body was picked up and thrown over a shoulder just hard enough to kickstart his heart.

He had died in the hospital bed - last rites and everything, the priest with cold flat fingers, leaning over his body tracing final moments on his clammy forehead, incanting a long-dead language. He had come back from that, and fought his way through pain and despair to make a new life – less than he had been but with the chance of a future.

He had died a little the day Peggy Carter threw a careless "I'm sorry, Daniel" over her shoulder and ran, knowing he wouldn't – couldn't – shoot her. Not her. He had died a little more interrogating her, seeing the agony on her normally composed face, hearing her usually crisp voice shake with pain. Even the shock of her betrayal was not enough to force his whole heart to beat.

Leaving New York; buying a home in LA; running his own team; meeting Violet – every step into the vista of that shiny new life had closed something off in him too – a promise he had made to himself. A dream of a different life.

He breathed, but the breaths were shallower – it was easy to breath shallow in superficial LA. His heart beat, but slowly, breaking in time to the ocean waves.

It stopped the day Peggy Carter walked into his bullpen, tossed a casual “Hello? Chief.” at him like a live grenade. It stuttered over the weeks she was in LA – a constant arrhythmia as they worked the case – as he watched every flicker of thought and feeling over her face, as he stumbled to follow her fretful pacing, as he faced her death at Isodyne, her fall from Whitney Frost’s clutches, her falling for a man who could hold a gun to her head…

_Why did you hold the gun on her and not on me?_

_I knew you’d fold. Because I would have._

She had always been his Achilles heel. And he only had one left.

And so, finally, he had cut the bonds loose – let her know that whatever had happened or not happened between them, she was free to make her choice. That he would be all right without her.

_I’m glad we got to work together again._

Living half a life was becoming a habit.

While the other men were squabbling over bragging rights for shutting down the rift generator, he stepped into the breach. It took no thought at all for a dead man. At least his last actions would matter. His broken body would mend the world, and save the girl.

Who promptly threw herself into the breach to save him back.

And it was Jarvis – not Stark, Wilkes, or Sammberly (he really was going to kill him one day) – but Jarvis, whose radiance was all in his heart and soul, who figured out that sacrificing Howard’s hover car instead of Chief Sousa would close the rift.

He had fallen back to earth - an angel denied his final grasp at heaven.

His team had closed the case, saved the world, and repelled the forces of evil and the Council. And Peggy was her own person with plans and a life back in New York.

Daniel was determined to stand a hero until she was too far away to see him fall again.

But he would make sure first that she left with no lingering doubts. He had come back from war with a damaged body and an indomitable spirit. He would come back from this hopeless love the same way – wounded and incomplete, but learning to live with a damaged soul.

So now he stood before her, straight and tall, a cocky smile on his face while he challenged her.

_You messed up… Nothing to say? No quick comeback?_

And when she launched herself into his arms, she kissed the life back into him. His lungs filled with her breath. His heart beat strong and fast. The blood in his veins sang with the thrill of her touch.

Daniel Sousa came back to life three years after his first death, in an SSR office chair, his arms filled with a breathless Peggy Carter.

**Author's Note:**

> The ship has sailed! And all evidence of charring is far behind us now!


End file.
